Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Alice Osbourne, Evangeline
Fountaine, Elsie Pigeon, Tanni Zaymen, and Frances Falconleigh are five women
from very different backgrounds who end up in the small town of Crowmarsh Priors and
become life long friends.

I enjoyed
the story, but I felt that the beginning and the end were unnecessary. The
novel starts with Tanni Zaymen carting her two grandchildren back to England. Or
something? It’s weird and gives this very strange oh no what is she hiding feeling that then got really confusing when
it switched to the past.

“The past” happens
in the 1930s, at the beginning of World War II and through most of the war. We
are introduced to each of the women one by one. My favorite is Tanni Zaymen, a
young Jewish woman living in Germany
with her mother, father, and two little twin
sisters. Tanni’s parents have realized that Germany is getting to be very
unsafe for Jews, and without telling Tanni, constructs a plan to get her out of
the country. The twins will follow on the Kindertransport, and hopefully they
would follow later. As a mob comes down on their street, Tanni’s family throws
her a wedding to a family friend so that she can get out of the country safely.

I have to
say, I have this weird fascination with WWII. Jewish internment camps and all
the creepy scientific experiments they did just feel like something straight
out of a horror movie, it amazes and disgusts me that that is a real part of
world history.

And the end rips you out of the
story just when everything is finally really interesting and gives all the
reveals a less-exciting tone.

How can I
say it without spoiling the book? Let’s use Harry Potter! What if, at the end
of book 7 we think Harry’s dead and then we go straight to the epilogue? And in
the epilogue Harry, Hermione, and Ron get together and explain to each other
why Harry didn’t actually die and we
find out Fred and Tonks and Lupin and everyone died and oh yeah Voldemort has Horcruxes
and once we find the last one we can FINALLY kill him! Why would that take you 50 years to figure out?

So is it my
new favorite book? Probably not. Was it bad? Not really. I’d read Atonement instead, but if you already
read that then War Brides is ok I
guess.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Why do we read books? Is it to
learn something? Is it to go on an adventure? Is it to get to know somebody who
may not be real but to you are more real than anyone on earth? Or is it
something else?

Someday,
Someday, Maybe is a new novel by actress Lauren Graham, best known for her
roles as Lorelai Gilmore in Gilmore Girls and Sarah Braverman in Parenthood,
the first of which is my favorite show that has ever been made in the entire
world. Seriously, Freshman year of college I was basically like “this is what
you need to know about me: I love coffee, the color pink, Harry Potter, and
Gilmore Girls,” that was the sum of my personality in four items. Later it
became clear that there was one thing that far surpassed my love of any of
these four things...acting. What is this book about? A young actress trying to
make it in New York City.

Now there are two ways that me
reading this book can go: either it’s amazing, and so inspirational I
immediately want to move to New YorkOR I want to quit acting forever
because she gets something that I
don’t. In reality, Lauren Graham peered into my soul and wrote a book about all
my insecurities and why they are ridiculous.

Franny Banks is a struggling
actress trying to make it in New York
City in the 90s. She gave herself three years to move
to New York
and make it as an actress before she would give up and return home…to face the
fact that she has no actual skills to enter the job force. We follow her on the
adventures and misadventures of trying to balance a job, class, and the
bloodthirsty world of auditions.

My favorite parts are when something good happens to Franny and it
sends her into a pit of despair because that one good thing is still not the
thing that was needed so that she could become a working actress. Yes, it moved
her in the right direction, but that can get lost in the shuffle when you’re
concerned about your audition and the shoot you wrapped and if you’re ever
going to get cast in anything ever again because, face it, your agent probably
already forgot about you. And of course, by favorite I mean I think I was
actually worrying about Franny’s plight when I left home.

Don’t worry, there’s also a love
story. It’s pretty satisfying.

I hated the ending because it meant
the book was over. I actually had a hard time starting the next one because I
was so involved in Franny’s world

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

I don’t know why everyone isn’t
reading this book. Brilliance is
basically the book that Michael Crichton would write about the X-men. Several
of the reviews I read were like “blah blah blah, it’s basically about the
X-men, blah blah blah not creative,” if that’s your criteria, technically Harry Potter wasn’t that groundbreaking.
Technically, it’s just a book about a wizard, coming of age, and going on a
hero’s journey. Technically that
stories been told.

Brilliance,
by Marcus Sakey takes place in the modern day of an alternate future, where 1%
of people born since 1980 are ‘brilliants.’ Brilliants don’t shoot lasers out
of their eyes or control the weather or anything super cool, they’re just really,
really smart. And that manifests itself into minor powers. A
little girl who can always tell if someone’s lying, a man who can sense
patterns in the stock market, a woman
who can go invisible by being where no one is looking, and Nick Cooper (our
hero) who can read what people are going to do by the tiniest movement of their
muscles. Ok, maybe this isn’t Crichton-level science fiction, but it definitely
makes sense.

not that I'm knocking these guys

Nick Cooper is a brilliant working
for the government to find and track brilliants, namely John Smith, a terrorist
who has killed hundreds already and is working on something even worse…

What I loved about this novel was the social commentary that came along
with the action-packed plot. There were news articles, copies of speeches, and
even advertisements in between some chapters. Not so many that it distracted
from the story, but just enough to create a fully realized world.

It started a bit slow, so don’t let
that fool you. I was reading it at the same time as Atonement, which complimented it well since Atonement is all about characters with some action and Brilliance is all about action with some
character development. I also finished it in the middle of a thunderstorm so I
LITERALLY jumped out of my seat a few times.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

I mentioned
before that I have a hoarding problem, with my stacks of books everywhere, some
cracked open, others half-finished, some laying there for years, possibly
forever because I bought it on a whim thinking the subject was interesting. I read it eagerly for 10 pages and then went back to Harry Potter.

Once I have heard of a book and
“mean” to read it, it probably goes on a list somewhere (thank God for
Goodreads). One of these books is
Atonement, which has been on my to-read list since the movie came out in
2007. I am not the biggest fan of Kiera Knightly so casting her in Atonement was basically a death sentence
to the book for me, but I heard it was amazing
and if that were the case then I could just read the book and I wouldn’t have
to bother with Kiera at all!

But I didn’t get it right away, and
the longer a book is on my list, the less likely I am to read it. There’s
always something new and shiny to catch my attention, and the book grows stale
on my shelf. The only way for it to re-gain my attention is if someone mentions
it. Fortunately for me, Atonement is
one of my friend’s favorite books. So I finally
read it.

Atonement is simply a work of art. It
starts on a summer day in 1934 as we follow 13-year-old Briony Tallis worry
about her cousins coming to stay, her newest play, and what exactly her sister is doing in the
garden with the servant’s son.

mostly moping

Briony’s
descriptions of everything are fabulous. McEwan crafts a brilliant story around
this very young girl and whose misunderstanding of the adult world leads to
disaster. After the first half, we see a first-hand view of World War II first
through the eyes of a soldier, then a nurse. McEwan moves from a slow summer’s
day into the middle of a retreating army and into a busy wartime hospital with
effortless prose. Each could be a story unto itself. But altogether, the
finished piece is perfect. I don’t know what to tell you except if you haven’t
read it yet you should.